February 1999 - Zope

Embedded HTML tables, shared annotations
by 30215.gz.uu 26 Feb '99

26 Feb '99

Hello zopers, I am using Zope to set up a small intranet, for a (small) clinical lab's self-documentation. This involves encoding as Zope objects, an already existing printed manual (ms word) of clinical analysis offers, to physicians. The thing is a big list with an "inside-out" systematic, by which I mean that maybe 25% of the entries are simplest case and follow a completely regular pattern, while the other entries vary from simple variants or generalizations of that simplest pattern, along different paths of generalization, to complex variations and completely ad hoc entries. With an RDBMS, I'd have had to regularize the data completely and sacrifice some of the information. Zope incites me to consider the challenge of capturing more of the existing data's structure and variations, e.g. users' (and future maintainers') style. Looking for the best of all words, I arrive at the idea to define a set of "method" names, whose results are HTML Tables, that "naturally" embed into each other. Somehow I have a feeling that the logic of such "distributed tabling" can be isolated from HTML, so that a nice and clean query language in terms of partial functions and 2D grid portions ("tableaux") might emerge. Since I am just starting on that hunch, I was wondering if somebody else had already hit on such an intuition and drawn any conclusions from which I could shamelessly profit. Also, these musings reminded me of an old project I had once started, to provide an uniform annotation facility to annotate web pages (using an ad hoc proxy). I abandonned it at the time (it was four or five years ago) because I had discovered that other groups were much more advanced on this, and, if I remember well, the w3c was standardizing such a facility. Then I parted from web work, but (while I did not look for it), I am quite surprised that nothing like it is currently in the hands of web users nowadays. Of course, the commercial drive of the growth of the web, in the meantime, explains it. Advertisement banners overtook the budding niche for users' annotations. But maybe the time is now ripe for the pendulum to swing back. Zope strikes me as a server model that could integrate a uniform shared annotations facility on the pages it publishes. Thoughts, pointers, wish to discuss, anyone ? Regards, Boris Borcic -- "c++ is a contradiction in terms" - Einstein

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zope-users list on Starship and qmail hints
by Christian Tismer 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

This is a message to the qmail users, which will now find a list qmail-users(a)starship.python.net since we have a quite nice Zope test bed on the starship now. The list is maintained by Chris Petrilli. Why is this interesting for the mailman list? Starship uses qmail. With qmail, every user has his own mailboxes, and he can handle everything like myname-other@site from his myname home directory. This is great. For Mailman, it is very bad, since ti gives you headaches whenever you want to set up a mailman list named zope-users, when a user zope is also existent. Problem: putting .qmail redirections into zope's home doesn't work, since you can of course spawn the Mailman wrappers, but they will complain because they want to be run from the mailer's GID, not your's. Solution: in /var/qmail/users/assign put the following lines: +zope-:alias:112:11:/var/qmail/alias:-:zope-: . (there must always be a single dot line). This tells qmail that every address beginning with "zope-" is not handled by zope, but by the alias user. The alias user runs under the correct GID, and its .qmail-default uses the /etc/aliases.cdb, which is what we need. cheers - chris -- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@appliedbiometrics.com> Applied Biometrics GmbH : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101 : *Starship* http://starship.python.net 10553 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net PGP Fingerprint E182 71C7 1A9D 66E9 9D15 D3CC D4D7 93E2 1FAE F6DF we're tired of banana software - shipped green, ripens at home

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Re: [Zope] Preserving Settings during a user's session
by pj＠sam.engr.sgi.com 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

|> Errr, could you hash in the user name as well so that ... If this just an exercise in generating a unique number, then that reminds of me of longstanding discussions culminating in such things as: |> Network Working Group Paul J. Leach, Microsoft |> INTERNET-DRAFT Rich Salz, Certco |> <draft-leach-uuids-guids-01.txt> |> Category: Standards Track |> Expires August 4, 1998 February 4, 1998 |> |> |> UUIDs and GUIDs |> |> |> ABSTRACT |> |> This specification defines the format of UUIDs (Universally Unique |> IDentifier), also known as GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifier). A UUID |> is 128 bits long, and if generated according to the one of the |> mechanisms in this document, is either guaranteed to be different |> from all other UUIDs/GUIDs generated until 3400 A.D. or extremely |> likely to be different (depending on the mechanism chosen). UUIDs |> were originally used in the Network Computing System (NCS) [1] and |> later in the Open Software Foundation's (OSF) Distributed Computing |> Environment [2]. ======================================================================= I won't rest till it's the best ... Software Production Engineer Paul Jackson (pj(a)sgi.com; pj(a)usa.net) 3x1373 http://sam.engr.sgi.com/pj

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Preserving Settings during a user's session
by Jeff Nielsen 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

Zopesters, I'm trying to accomplish something and I can't figure out an elegant way to do it. I need to preserve variables, like State=CA or ID=5, throughout a user's session, unless I specifically change them in a page (i.e. I change ID=5 to ID=4). I can think of two methods: a. Passing all the values in the link syntax for all page links: <a href=page_name?ID=5&State=CA&Region=1&Tab=Guide>Link text</a> b. Storing the values in cookies. I'd prefer not to use cookies as this will be a public web site and some people have privacy concerns about cookies. Anybody got a better idea? Jeff jeffniel(a)ix.netcom.com P.S. I've been Zoping for about a month now. Zope Rocks!

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Re: [Zope] HELP NEEDED - EXTREMELY URGENT (Zope on NT4 SP4)
by Stefan Franke 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

Oh, I forgot to add: The problem appears still with v1.10.2. (to repeat it: Zope crashes on a Win NT4 SP4 - propably German version only - box but not with the SP3 on identical machines with a naked OS installation. The exception says 'database corrupted', but this is not the case). Stefan

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Re: [Zope] HELP NEEDED - EXTREMELY URGENT (Zope on NT4 SP4)
by Stefan Franke 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

Ok today I checked that my problem is definitely caused by the Win NT SP4. Since I did not read something similar on this list so far, it is possible that it only appears with the german version of the service pack. I don't know with which MSVC compiler version Zope's 17 .pyd files were built, but AFAI heard, service pack 2 for visual studio is fixes some problems SP1 creates mainly in conjunction with the lastest NT 'service pack', which is in fact a major OS change/ upgrade. Since our application is required to run on the SP4 machine (our customer believes it is, and it is advertised by M$ as the only solution to possible Y2K problems) my question is if someone has already built the .c files with the very latest compiler versions. If not (and they are not already) I'll do this myself, but it would save me a lot of time - please give me a short note. Maybe there are others on the list who have access to a german SP4 box and can confirm my expiriences so we could add this to the bug track list. Stefan

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RE: [Zope] Problems installing Confera.
by Paul Everitt 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

Jose wrote: > ImportError: No module named SearchIndex.TextIndex You're using Zope 1.9. Confera requires stuff added to Zope 1.10. --Paul Paul Everitt Digital Creations paul(a)digicool.com 540.371.6909

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Problems installing Confera.
by Jose.Lacal＠icn.siemens.com 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

Folks: I downloaded http://www.zope.org/Download/Prereleases/ConferaConfera-1.2.0-nonbin.tgz I un-zipped and un-tarred it under /Zope/lib/python/Products/Caldera (on a 486/33 running Red Hat 5.0) Under Control Panel / Product Management I see the entry: "Broken product Confera (Confera)" "There are currently no items in Broken product Confera." Under Traceback I get: Confera Import Traceback Traceback (innermost last): File "/home/brian/temp/build/tmp_build/Zope-1.9.0-linux2-x86/lib/python/OFS/Appl ication.py", line 378, in import_products File "lib/python/Products/Confera/__init__.py", line 92, in ? import Confera, FileObject File "lib/python/Products/Confera/Confera.py", line 95, in ? from SearchIndex.TextIndex import TextIndex ImportError: No module named SearchIndex.TextIndex Any assistance appreciated. Regards.

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document_id vs document_title
by Max Murdock 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

Having a document in any folder I noticed this odd behaviour from the "if" statement: I can test on document_title but ain't been able at all to make "if" recognize the document_id... EG: running this piece of code I get "yabadabadooo out of luck" (obviously I made a doc with id and title "ttt"...)  yabadabadooo  out of luck   yabadabadooo  out of luck  ...and the same with id and title of any folder. I suspect Zope is that I cannot make any test on "id"... this compells me to always provide a title to a doc if I want to test for its existence... Max Murdock

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Upgrade Difficulties from 1.9 to 1.10.
by solberg＠platinum.com 25 Feb '99

25 Feb '99

I am trying to migrate my Data.bbb file from my 1.9 installation to a new 1.10 installation. I get a "Sorry, a SERIOUS APPLICATION ERROR occurred." message. In the source of the page, it has the following: ========================================================= <html> <head> <title>exceptions.ImportError</title> </head> <body> Sorry, a SERIOUS APPLICATION ERROR occurred.<p>  </body> </html> ========================================================= Before this, I shutdown the Zope process on the 1.10 server and copied the Data.bbb.old file from a Pack operation on the 1.9 server. I renamed it to Data.bbb. Should this work? Does anyone know how to solve this one? Thanks, John Solberg

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